I'll say this upfront: I'm the person who made the mistakes. Nine years handling press maintenance for a regional newspaper operation, and I've personally made—and documented—14 significant errors, totaling roughly $23,000 in wasted budget. Not proud of the number. Proud of the checklist I now keep to stop anyone else from repeating it.
Here's the opinion I didn't hold when I started, but landed on after all of it:
Most press failures aren't equipment failures. They're deferred maintenance bills, all arriving on the same day.
The machine didn't "just break." Someone decided the check could wait until next week, and next week never came. I know, because that someone was me.
My First Year, My Worst Mistake
In 2017, I made the classic error: I heard a vibration and decided it wasn't worth investigating. The press was a Goss Community printing press—the workhorse of small and mid-size newspaper plants since the 1960s. Cast-iron frames, reliable folder, built to run forever. That's exactly what I told myself, standing next to unit 2 with a faint buzz coming from the idler roller.
I knew I should stop the line and check it. But the daily paper was on deadline, the press was running at speed, and what were the odds the bearing would actually fail that week? So I skipped it. One week turned into two. The vibration got slightly louder, but it's easy to ignore a hum when you're watching 20,000 impressions an hour.
You know what happened next. The bearing seized, the shaft snapped, and a piece of metal punched through the folding section. The damage: $3,600 in replacement parts, four days of downtime, and a paper that hit the loading dock so late it missed the same-day USPS entry deadline. According to USPS Business Mail 101, if the mail isn't entered by the scheduled time, it waits for the next mailing day. Our readers noticed.
The bearing cost $34. The total bill—parts, lost production, missed deadlines—was closer to $7,800. And none of it needed to happen.
That's the hard lesson: the press that "has never broken down" is really a press that hasn't broken down yet. If you rely on a Goss press line, you're not maintaining the machine to keep me happy—you're maintaining your own schedule. And that logic applies at every scale.
I was told early on to never skip the vibration analysis. I didn't actually believe it until I paid $7,800 to learn it. Now it's step one on every checklist we post.
A Flash Forge 3D Printer Taught Me the Same Lesson, Cheaper
After the Goss incident, I earned a reputation as the guy who skips checks. I tried to rebuild by becoming the guy who builds things. We bought a Flash Forge 3D printer for the shop to make nylon bushings, small guards, and masking fixtures for press changeovers. And I immediately treated it like a toy.
My reasoning: "It's a hobby-grade machine. It can't be as sensitive as production equipment. Worst case, I waste a print."
The first serious job was a 40-piece run of custom fixtures. I skipped the bed-level and belt-tension checks because "the last print looked fine." The first layer lifted, and by hour two the printhead was dragging a nest of melted filament across the build plate. About $60 of material ruined, a full day lost, and the whole crew watched me troubleshoot something a 10-minute pre-check would have caught.
Same mistake, at 1/50th of the cost. The maintenance isn't the inconvenience you're avoiding—the failure is.
I printed a checklist card and mounted it on the 3D printer's frame. Thirty minutes of work, and we've run about 300 prints since without a single failure. The hardware didn't change. The process did.
The Question Everyone Asks About Inkjet Printers
Here's a question I get more often than almost any other, usually from the same people who skip their maintenance routines: can you use sublimation paper in an inkjet printer?
Yes, technically, sublimation paper will feed through most standard inkjet printers. But it's pointless if you're not using sublimation ink. And if you switch to sublimation ink in a regular inkjet, you're signing up for a printhead cleaning schedule that makes press maintenance look like a vacation. Sublimation ink dries fast, and it clogs nozzles even faster. Skip the weekly nozzle check and you'll find out—usually by running a full batch with streaks on every sheet.
I've watched three separate customers destroy printheads that way. In every case, the question wasn't "can I?" It was "what's it going to cost me if I skip a step?" Same question I failed to ask about that idler bearing in 2017. The answer is rarely $0.
The HP Printer Phone Number That Changed My Policy
We keep an HP LaserJet in the office for forms, labels, and the occasional shipping document. A laser printer—the last piece of equipment I expected to teach me anything.
In September 2022, it started throwing a fuser error. The office manager spent 45 minutes trying to find the official HP printer phone number, then another 40 minutes on hold, only to have a support rep walk her through steps she'd already tried. The verdict: new fuser, about $220, and the part number for a local tech to install it.
The repair was fine. The price was fine. But the story behind it wasn't. The fuser died because the paper we'd loaded into the office printer had been sitting in a damp storage room for three months. The paper absorbed moisture, forcing the fuser to work harder every single print, until it gave up.
The most frustrating part is that I knew this. Paper storage is printing 101. But we treated the office printer's paper as an afterthought because it's small and cheap and "just office equipment." It was the same deferred-maintenance tax, just in a smaller envelope.
I now keep that local service tech's number taped to my monitor—not the support line. It's a reminder that support phone numbers are great. Not needing them is better.
I Get Why People Skip Maintenance (I Did)
Let me be fair: I know exactly why you're skipping checks, because I skipped them for years.
To be fair, the maintenance budget is real. A check takes 10 minutes of someone's time, and in a print operation, time is money. Meanwhile, maintenance is invisible—nobody claps when the press runs without problems, but everyone asks questions when it's down.
That's the trap. Skipping maintenance never looks like a bad decision, until it does.
Granted, some of my current habits look excessive. We log bearing temperatures, belt tensions, air filter pressures. I check the Flash Forge 3D printer's build plate every Friday, even when nothing printed all week. Did I feel ridiculous at first? Absolutely. But we haven't missed a press run in 18 months, and we've caught 47 potential failures during checks—most of them would've stopped the press mid-run.
Here's how the math works: the checklist has 12 points and costs us maybe $200 a month in labor. The alternative is a $7,800 failure at 2 a.m., four hours before the newspaper has to be on the truck. A planned 20-minute maintenance stop is expensive—until you compare it to a full-day breakdown with an emergency parts order at rush freight prices.
And on a Goss press, especially an older Community model, spare parts aren't always sitting on a shelf. Lead times are real. If you don't believe me, call the service numbers on your own sticky notes and ask how long a folder gear takes to arrive.
People ask whether routine Goss press maintenance is really worth the cost. My answer after all these years is simple: the press that goes down at 2 a.m. doesn't care if you think you were short on time.
What I'd Tell My 2017 Self
If I could go back to the night I first heard that vibration, I'd tell myself: stop the press. Take the 10 minutes. Replace the $34 bearing. Eat the small cost now, and enjoy the peace of mind later.
Then I'd hand over the checklist I actually use today. A checklist isn't a list of official rules—it's a list of things you know, from experience, that you'll forget otherwise.
My original view was that maintenance happened when the machine told you it was needed. My current view, after $23,000 in documented mistakes, is a lot simpler:
Preventive maintenance isn't a cost. It's the cheapest insurance any print operation can buy.
Every skipped check is a bet against the odds. And the odds always catch up to someone—usually the person who didn't take the bet seriously.
I keep the tech's number on a sticky note. I keep the checklist on every machine that matters, down to the 3D printer. Between the two, this shop has saved an estimated $8,000 in potential rework and emergency repairs in the last 18 months. Not bad for someone whose first instinct was to skip the check.
The press doesn't care that you were busy. The fuser doesn't care about your deadline. They just run—until they don't. My job, and yours, is to make sure that "until" is a very long time.